• Expert Tips for Handling Emergencies: Staying Cool in Chaos at Work or Home

    Date Published: October 2, 2024

    Watch an informative LinkedIn Live featuring Dr. Matt Levy, a member of the Red Cross Scientific Advisory Council and an expert in emergency care due to his years as an emergency department physician and first responder. In this episode, he focuses on how to stay calm when faced with a medical emergency and the crucial first steps to take in the moments following an incident.

    Top Takeaways

    Lay responders play a crucial role in the initial moments of an emergency. Dr. Levy highlights that even without professional training, individuals can make a significant difference by following basic principles and staying calm in the workplace or at home.

    Check

    • “Check, Call, Care” Framework: The Red Cross teaches a triage response framework that includes checking the scene for safety, calling for help and providing care. This structured approach helps lay responders effectively manage emergencies.
    • Safety First: When arriving on the scene, Dr. Levy emphasizes the importance of first ensuring personal safety to avoid becoming an additional victim. This includes surveying the scene for dangers and communicating risks to others.
    • Scene Security: Securing the scene is vital to prevent further harm. This might involve moving the injured person to a safer location. The goal is to avoid creating additional emergencies.
    • Use of Bystanders: If bystanders are available, they can help manage the scene. For example, they can watch for oncoming traffic or get medical equipment that can be used to respond.
    • Intuition and Common Sense: Dr. Levy stresses the importance of using intuition and common sense during emergencies. If something doesn’t feel right, it’s likely not safe. Trusting your instincts can help prevent further accidents.

    Call

    • Prepare before calling: Think about what you'll say and verify your location. Know your location using GPS or landmarks.
    • Follow operator instructions: Avoid talking over them and answer questions clearly and concisely.
    • Communicate effectively: Use voice communication, speak clearly, and stay on the line. If safe, use speakerphone for situational awareness.
    • Delegate tasks: Enlist bystanders to help with specific tasks. Be direct and concise. Confirm understanding and completion of tasks.
    • Ensure safety: Avoid moving injured persons and make sure the scene is safe.
    • Adapt to the situation: If there's no cell signal, instruct someone to find a location where they can call 911.

    Care

    • Identify and prioritize life-threatening conditions: Look for severe bleeding, unconsciousness, and signs of opioid overdose. If there are multiple people who need help, prioritize these emergency conditions first. Swift intervention is crucial in these time-sensitive emergencies.
    • Be prepared: Carry essential first aid supplies like a bleeding control kit, disposable gloves, naloxone and a first aid kit. These are particularly useful if you spend a lot of time in a vehicle.
    • Take a course: Training in first aid can help you respond effectively in emergencies. The Red Cross offers First Aid/CPR/AED courses for certification. Or you can take a course such as “Until Help Arrives,” which teaches you how to take action and provide life-saving care when you are the first on the scene during an emergency.

    Video Transcript

    Background/Introduction

    Marie Manning: Hello, everyone. Welcome to this LinkedIn Live. I'm Marie Manning. I work in the training services division here at the American Red Cross, and I'm so glad that you're able to join us today.

    First thing is bit of housekeeping. Please drop any questions or comments into the chat box at any time and we'll get to them. If it makes sense for us to interrupt the program and ask them, we absolutely will or we'll get to them at the end of the session.

    Now, I also want to let you know that we're starting a regular series of these LinkedIn Lives with featuring the experts who advise the Red Cross on our training programs. They're members of our Scientific Advisory Council, which is about a 70-plus panel of experts in medicine, in science, in academia, in aquatics from all different professions, and their expertise is invaluable to us. So we're going to be starting a LinkedIn Live session, and this is our first one.

    The reason we chose this one is because September is Preparedness Month, and for our very first episode, we wanted to focus around the topic of preparedness, what do you do if there's a medical emergency, and what are the crucial first steps to take in the moments after an accident? So I've said a lot there. Without further ado, I'm going to introduce our guest, Dr. Matt Levy, and I'm going to read from my prepared biography here for him. So excuse me as I look away from the screen.

    Dr. Levy sits on our First Aid Sub-Council of the Scientific Advisory Council. He's an associate professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He's also a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians and a fellow of the Academy of Emergency Medical Services. He works closely with multiple local, state, and federal emergency medical services, special operations medicine, and disaster medicine response elements. So you can see he's perfect for this particular live.

    He does a lot of research, focuses on pre-hospital, operational, disaster medicine. Here's what's really interesting about Dr. Levy. He's the medical director of Howard County Fire and Rescue and serves as the regional medical director for the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems. He's the tactical physician with the Maryland State Police and Howard County Police. He's also the founding commander of the Maryland-1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team, it's live, and the medical director of the paramedic program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

    So Dr. Levy, that's quite the background, perfect for going through emergency essentials and what to do when moments matters. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to structure this particular live around what the Red Cross teaches in its courses. So we triage response into three categories, check, call, care. So, I'm going to ask you some questions. I'd like for you to answer from your perspective of what you do on the ground and how it relates to a lay responder who may come upon the scene before you even get there. So thank you for being with us on this program.

    Matt Levy, MD: Thanks, Marie. Thanks for having me. It's great to be with you and it's great to have so many people who've tuned in to listen to us talk about this topic. It's interesting, it's really an important topic and quite truthfully, whether you're a seasoned professional rescuer or someone who may be taking some training or wanting to know what to do to help their loved ones or their co-workers, these fundamental principles of what to do and how to do them really do transcend all levels of training and response. So I think it's a great topic and I couldn't agree more that Preparedness Month is a great time to talk about it.

    Marie Manning: Excellent. All right, so let's talk about what the immediate priority is when you first arrive on the scene of an accident.

    Matt Levy, MD: The first and foremost thing we always say is you always want to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. And the best way to not become part of the problem is to not become a patient or an injured victim yourself. And so safety is really paramount. Knowing and surveying the situation, looking around you to see if there's something that is actively dangerous or a threat and to minimize your chance of getting hurt is really, really important.

    See, because if you become a patient, then we have two patients to respond to, and more importantly than not, that could delay the life-saving care to someone who may need it more quickly. But above all, we want to keep you healthy and safe. So this concept of check around you, check the scene, check yourself, and then if safe and able to do so, proceed cautiously.

    Marie Manning: Okay. So we talked about the first actions you take to ensure the safety of yourself, checking the scene, but how do you ensure that any risks are communicated to other people that show up on the scene?

    Matt Levy, MD: Keep it simple is the best answer. And if there is something dangerous there, be it a slippery surface on the ground or a downed power wire or maybe broken glass or maybe active vehicles on a roadway, communicating that to the people around you is really important. I've done it myself. Sometimes I'll be the first person on the scene of a car crash or I'll be the first person responding to an injury or an illness and I'll say to a bystander on scene, "Hey, watch my back. I need to take care of this person. Tell me if there's a car coming or tell me if there's an issue."

    Or, if there is something dangerous that precludes you from going to help the injured person try communicating with them, "Hey, I can't come to you. You come to me," or, "Step off of the road. Let's go over here and talk." So use those common sense kinds of things, use that intuition. If it doesn't feel right, it's probably not right and be careful.

    Marie Manning: Okay, let's try this one more time. It's live. Talk to us about securing the scene. How do you do that? How do you go about doing it? Why is it important?

    Matt Levy, MD: Well, again, safety and security are the most important things we can do to help someone who may need help in a time of an emergency. And the reason is because we don't want to create more emergencies that could detract from the situation.

    Sometimes it's very easy. Sometimes it's moving the person out of the way if it's safe to do so. Sometimes it's moving the threat a little bit out of the way. What do I mean by that? It might mean making sure that the vehicle is placed in park if you're on the scene of a car crash. It might mean if there's a ladder on its side, pulling it out of the way or moving a piece of furniture out of the way so there's some room to work.

    Sometimes we can make an environment safer by mitigating a potential threat or minimizing the chance of someone else getting injured. Sometimes we can't do that and when we can't do that, we have to make a decision and that decision really comes in a matter of is it so dangerous that I have to get myself out of there so I don't get myself hurt and/or possibly the person such as if the vehicle's on fire, such as if there's a hostile situation or a threat of some type.

    But more often than not, the best way that at the initial phase of response to an emergency that one can make themself safe is by maintaining situational awareness. Head on swivel is what we like to say, watching the 360. Sometimes, and one of the things that we teach our professional rescuers, Marie, is when they get on scene to do a 360 assessment to look all around so they're not just getting tunnel vision on what's right in front of them. But take a quick look around because if I'm looking at you then unless I have a rearview mirror or eyes behind my head, I don't know what's going on behind me.

    And so those are little small strategies. Watch where you step, watch where you walk, and be calculated with your motions because you don't want to trip, you don't want to fall, you don't want to slip. These are all things that I've done over the years that have happened to me when responding to scenes. Fortunately, I've been lucky. I've been fortunate that I haven't gotten seriously injured, but it happens very, very quickly. Don't let your guard down.

    Marie Manning: That's interesting. That head swivel thing is not something I've heard before, but it makes a whole lot of sense to do that 360 view.

    All right, so we've covered off check. The next thing you do once you make sure that the scene is safe is call. So how do you communicate with emergency services and other responders in the very first minutes after an accident happens or you come upon an accident?

    Matt Levy, MD: First off, I would be remiss if I didn't give a shout-out to my colleagues and the professionals who staff the front lines of our 911 emergency call centers in the country and around the world for that matter. These are truly unsung heroes, highly trained professionals who have an incredibly stressful job and are the voice of calm and the voice of reason during often chaotic and incredibly stressful and challenging situations. So we as a society owe them a great debt of gratitude, but that's not what we're here to talk about today.

    Back to how you call and what you do. It is important, and this is also a lesson that I've learned along the way from talking on radios and communicating mission-critical information, think about what you're going to say before you say it out loud. Say it to yourself, make sure it makes sense and then say it.

    This is part of this whole notion of the communication sender-receiver feedback model. When you call 911, take a breath. The first thing that 911 operator needs to do is verify that you are indeed where the computer says that you are. Your phone, most of us, 60% of the population's walking around with a cell phone if not more, your phone has GPS. It has advanced technology in it, but it may not always be the most accurate for any number of reasons. So making sure that that 911 operator knows where exactly you are is so important.

    Try to avoid talking over the 911 operator. They are following a very prescribed and well-engineered series of algorithms and questions. Answer their questions even if it doesn't make sense. Answer their questions so that they can move through the information they need to get help started to you.

    Now, sometimes there are any number of reasons why there could be noise, there could be a bad connection, there can be signal, you can text to 911 centers. People don't know that you can do that, but we really want you to try to communicate via voice. The text message, it doesn't give them all the information they need to know.

    So my recommendations are, number one, speak slowly, speak clearly. Know that the help cannot get to you if they don't know where you are. And the help needs to know exactly where you are and what the problem is. Don't hang up the phone until they're done. They'll tell you when to hang up the phone or they'll leave you on the phone.

    And another pro tip I tell people all the time is use your phone on speakerphone if it's safe to do so. Keep your hands free. Why? Number one, you can be doing things like helping someone. Number two, it helps you maintain situational awareness and you're not going like this, not paying attention to an environment that might not be safe around you.

    And then the last thing, like I said earlier, is try to be very concise with the information that they're asking for you. They want to help you. They want to send help. They need to know exactly where you are and exactly what the problem is. That's how I would approach that.

    Marie Manning: Okay, so now I have a follow-up question to that. I'm on the highway, I see an accident, I pull over from the highway. How do I identify where I am? What kind of signals or words do I say to the 911 operator?

    Matt Levy, MD: Well, maintaining situational awareness of where you are is really important. If your car has GPS, if your car has a map and you can know your location, that's super helpful. But a lot of people don't realize that our highways have marker signs on the side of them, mile marker signs. There may be other geographic fixtures or indicators or icons that you can use.

    It's always better to use an established marker like an exit sign or a mile marker sign than to use something that could change such as a commercial venture because where the new store is, if you're near the pizza shop, maybe last month it wasn't a pizza shop. So these kinds of things, you want to try to use fixed and established way-points or landmarks to guide them as to where you're at.

    If you don't know, say, "I don't know." Sometimes it's hard. If you're traveling 65 miles an hour doing the posted speed limit on a highway, you're going 65 feet per second. You're going pretty fast. And so the last sign you saw, by the time you call 911, it may be a mile behind you. And so you have to think about that as well. I don't know exactly where I am. I know I'm northbound. I know I'm southbound. I'm on this road and the last thing I passed was blank. That will be good enough to at least get the process started.

    But cell phones also do weird things where they can bounce across bodies of water and stuff like that, the signals. So we have to be mindful of the fact that there may be even in a large metropolitan area, the same street name over and over again or a road that runs a long distance. So trying to give as many relative coordinates as possible is helpful.

    Marie Manning: Okay. Now we have a couple of people stopped, so now I have some help who's there on the scene, not first responders yet, but just other people who stopped. How do I manage and delegate tasks among these team members who have stopped by?

    Matt Levy, MD: Well, first things first, people want to help. People want to do the right thing. And it's important that we avoid causing harm along the way. So we really should only be moving people if it's an immediate danger to life or health. If the car is on fire, if it's actively leaking fuel, if they're lying in the roadway and cars are whizzing by you. Otherwise, I would avoid moving an injured person, particularly someone who's not conscious. You don't want to cause more harm. There are extenuating circumstances where you may have to do that, but as a rule of thumb, I would avoid moving them unless we absolutely had to.

    I would try to and help enlist the people around you to do things like, "Hey, I need you to help watch for traffic to make sure that nobody else comes. I may need you. Can you go make sure that their car is in park and that the emergency brake is on?" I can't tell you how many times I've come on the scene of a motor vehicle crash and the vehicle is running and it's still in drive. It's stationary, but that can happen, vehicles can roll, all these kinds of things. Even in a home environment where you may have someone who took a slip and a fall, be careful if there's a slippery surface on the ground. So trying to make things as safe as possible and point out the visible threats is important.

    One of the most important things you can do if you have to work with other people on scene who may be other lay rescuers or may not have professional rescue experience is you need to try to use closed-loop communication. I need you to go over there, put the car in park and come back and tell me when you've done that. Can you do that? Yes. Thank you. Be very direct, be very, very concise and very focused with your messaging. Don't give people a laundry list of things to do. That's not the way the brain works in crisis.

    So give them simple tasks that can be done. I need you to hold pressure. This leg is bleeding a lot. I need you to hold pressure on this bleeding wound for me while I go check on the other person, these kinds of things. These are just very discrete, focused, small, but very important tasks that can be done to help get control of a situation.

    Marie Manning: So I want to go back to that feedback loop because I did a couple of this when I took a severe bleeding cross. It's also important for you as the person to repeat back to once people come on the scene if need be. So you, Dr. Levy, would say to me, "Go make sure the car is in park and the emergency brake is on." I say, "Yes, I'm going to go make sure the car is in park and I'll put the emergency brake on and come right back." So it's just as important for you to remember to repeat that back. Isn't that true?

    Matt Levy, MD: Yeah, absolutely. You really need to have that closed loop because I need to know that you're coming back. Or if my cell phone doesn't work where I'm at, because we're in a little bit of a gully or a ravine and I can't get a signal out, I may say, "I need you to go up a hundred feet up the road, call 911, tell them exactly where we're at and then come back and tell me that you did that." So that person knows, "Okay, here's what I'm going to do and here's ..." You got to close that loop, otherwise, how do you know that they did it?

    Marie Manning: Exactly. All right, so we're about two thirds through our live. And whether you were here from the beginning or you've joined us in progress, we'd love to hear your thoughts, your comments, your input, your questions. You can drop them into the comment box, into the chat box, and we will get to them.

    So now back to the last element of check, call, care, care. What are the first aid priorities in the immediate aftermath of an emergency?

    Matt Levy, MD: One of the first things that we want to do is look for the life-threatening injuries or conditions that require immediate care. Marie, maybe said another way, these are the things that we as all members of society, if everybody knows how to do, we can change the outcome for some time-critical emergencies. So we're looking for people who are severely bleeding. We're looking for people who are unconscious and not breathing, looking for people who may have signs of an opioid overdose. Situations, and there's really only a handful of those situations where we have to act swiftly and immediately to change the trajectory the person's on and to help give them the best outcome possible.

    So what I really emphasize that people do is I'm in my mind scanning. I'm scanning. The first thing I'm looking for is do I see life-threatening bleeding because it may be apparent? And if I do, I'm going to get pressure on it and I'm going to utilize the training and education I have and stop the bleed and bleeding control to actually temporize that situation.

    If they're not conscious or not breathing, we have another problem. They may be in cardiac arrest. They may need CPR and a defibrillator right away. Those are two things, Marie, that every person needs to know how to do. They need to know how to do compressions-only CPR and how to stop the bleed and how to use a defibrillator. We can really change outcomes if everyone knew how to do that. And waiting for EMS to arrive, that can be too long for some people.

    Let's talk about cardiac arrest for one second. For every minute that someone's in cardiac arrest, their chance of survival goes down by 7 to 10%. So delaying CPR can have a real significant negative effect on someone. Same thing for life-threatening bleeding.

    So as we're prioritizing, I'm looking for the patients who are unconscious. I'm looking for the patients who may not be breathing or not breathing normally. I'm looking for the patients who are bleeding severely. If I can remember those three things, then that's where I'm going to focus initially. And then I may check around for other stuff. If everyone's conscious, no one's bleeding severely and everyone's breathing, okay, then I'm going to start looking for other things. But that's why we want you to take a course so we could teach you all this stuff.

    Those are the basics and those are the things that we want people to focus on. And I'll tell you, if we do those and we can do those well, we can foster a much more resilient society, be much more ready for emergencies, and be able to help ourselves, our family members and our neighbors.

    Marie Manning: Okay, so let me skip to, you're there, you want to treat the person. Are there tools or supplies that you should be carrying with you, be it in your car, be it on your person? For example, I have a tourniquet in my car. What else should I have? What if I were on the subway? What if I were, it's somewhere else?

    Matt Levy, MD: So everyone lives their own life and leads their own life. And you have to think about in the course of your routine day, how about you would interact with people in society. If you're sitting in an office space all day long, you may want to have a small kit in your office or know where the AED is in your building and know how to use it, all those things.

    If you're someone who spends a lot of time in a vehicle, like I spend a tremendous amount of my time in a vehicle going to meetings and to trainings and to all over the region. And so the vehicles that I'm in have certain equipment in them. But in my personal vehicles, I personally have stocked a bleed kit in each of my vehicles. I have gloves in each of my vehicles. I carry Narcan, naloxone in each of my vehicles, and I even carry a defibrillator. And I believe very strongly about that.

    The reality is the price of those devices have come down. They're still expensive, but they cost less than most cell phones nowadays or just as much so. That device could save a life. That's what I choose to carry. For my personal protective equipment perspective, I have at least a pair of gloves. I actually carry two pairs of gloves and I usually carry some alcohol hand sanitizer and some wipes to clean up if I need to. And obviously in the era of COVID in the post-COVID world we live in, I do carry some masks too.

    Marie Manning: That's so interesting. And one of our viewers, Mark, I'm not going to say his last name because it's too long, but Mark just said personal protective equipment is definitely a must in this day and age.

    Matt Levy, MD: Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes things happen and you may not have personal protective equipment available. You have to make a calculated decision there. I'd never ask anybody to put themselves in harm's way. That's something that's an individual decision. But if someone's bleeding severely and you don't have gloves, consider using anything you can as a barrier between yourself and that person's blood to minimize getting it on your skin. But certainly having personal protective equipment is real easy and it's not very expensive. A couple pairs of gloves in a Ziploc bag and you're good to go.

    Marie Manning: All right, so the last question I have before we take some questions from our audience, and there are some questions in our queue, is what techniques do you use to manage stress and maintain your composure in a high-pressure situation like one of the ones we're describing?

    Matt Levy, MD: So that's a really interesting question and I think it's going to be slightly different for each person. Many people have heard about the stress response, the fight or flight response people have. In my experience, it's really fight, flight, or freeze. Some people are just out of there, flight, they're out. That's not their thing and they're not going to. And I respect that and I understand that. When we talk about fight in this situation, we're talking about help. We're talking about rendering emergency care. The freeze is the one you got to be careful about because if you lock up, if you freeze up, you could yourself become injured, you could yourself delay care, those kinds of things.

    So one of the most important things someone can do is to get some formal training. Getting some formal training and learning about what to do and how to do it will help make you more comfortable, give you a chance to practice those skills, and you can then think through what your individual response will be.

    I had a college roommate, Marie, and he was a pilot. He was actually a fighter pilot, and one of the things that he shared with me was that fighter pilots in their training oftentimes practice all their maneuvers with their eyes closed. There's any number of reasons why they might have to do that, smoke in the cockpit, a bird strike, any number of things. But deep down inside, the most fundamental reason why is because if you could do it with your eyes closed, you could do it with your eyes open.

    Now, I'm not telling you to help people with your eyes closed, but what I am telling you to do is to think about what you might have to do and rehearse it in your mind after you get the proper training. And I think that's actually a really good segue for us to talk about some of the many training resources that we put together.

    One thing I'm really proud of is this curriculum that we've put together that we call Until Help Arrives. That's about a 90 minute online-only course. It's not a certification course, but it covers all of the topics that we just talked about. And I think it would be really cool if we have a second to just show the clip of the course so that people can learn this is available.

    We partnered, the American Red Cross and the American College of Emergency Physicians partnered on this course. This course is a derivation of some prior work that was done by the government and FEMA to help raise awareness and it's a great course. I'm super proud of it and I hope you like it. So Marie, can we show them the course for a second?

    Marie Manning: Yeah, let's do it.

    Matt Levy, MD: Okay.

    Video: Welcome to this American Red Cross online session. By the end of your training, you'll be prepared to recognize and safely respond to a wide variety of life-threatening emergencies. Let's start by getting familiar with the dashboard. This page will reveal the modules included in the course. To begin your learning experience, click the red start button. Start with module one. When you complete a module, the next module will become available. At the bottom of each topic page is a link to the next available topic. Use the menu button to return to the course menu at any time. Let's get started.

    Marie Manning: It really is a fantastic course. I've taken it myself and it goes through the four major emergencies you'll find when you need to take immediate action until that help arrives. So I encourage everyone, you can go find it at redcross.org/untilhelparrives. So that's redcross.org/untilhelparrives.

    Okay, so now I'd like to take some questions and we have a couple in the chat box. The first one is from Kadena. She says, "How do you handle emotional crowds and spectators with phones?"

    Matt Levy, MD: Well, quite honestly, it's an interesting question, emotional crowds. If an emotional crowd is becoming so disruptive that it's interfering with your ability to care for the person, at some point it becomes a safety issue for yourself. So you have to balance those two things. I would not advise you to challenge someone. I would not advise you to engage with them. I would advise you to ignore them. Just like we learned in school, just ignore the person, ignore the bully.

    Now spectators with phones, the reality is, everybody, if you're in public, you're being recorded. That's just the way the world works right now. So spectators with phones, it's a sad state of society, my own personal opinion, that more people are watching with a phone than helping. We're making an earnest effort to change that by doing things like this, like raising awareness.

    What I would say is, "Hey, I need you to step out of the way so I can take care of this person." Or sometimes it's, "I really need your help, can you help me?" And sometimes that's enough for someone to snap out of it and say, "Yes, of course." And they'll help you, that kind of thing. So those are some strategies.

    I would not encourage you to challenge them, to confront them or to try to defuse that situation. Unless you have special training in that or that's the role that you're in societally, I wouldn't ask you to do that. Chances are at that point, you're making more work than you're solving by doing that.

    If someone is in the way and they are potentially a danger to themselves because of a threat, you could even say, "I'm worried about your safety. You're standing in the road. You might want to take a step back just so you don't get hurt." Or "Hey, you may want to take a step back. I don't know if you know there's ..." That kind of thing.

    But just be sincere and genuine about it and people are going to do what they're going to do. We can't control the emotional responses of other people. We can control our own emotional response. And one pro tip that I teach to my residents in the hospital and to my EMT and paramedic students is on these calls, on these situations, on these incidents, if you feel yourself getting emotionally worked up and upset, you're losing your objectivity. And that's a spot where you can find yourself getting hurt, and so you got to be careful.

    Marie Manning: Okay, good. Another question, this is from a LinkedIn user says they have heard this before. Is it true that you can be held liable for possible passing or in an injury when assisting in an accident or an emergency?

    Matt Levy, MD: It's an interesting question. Each state and actually the federal government for when you're in an airplane, but each state has what's called a good Samaritan law. And I've done some research on this topic actually, and I've published a couple of papers about this and we've looked at this topic. These good Samaritan laws have started off as a way to engage members of the medical community to help outside of their normal scope of work or outside of their normal, I would say, role when they encountered an emergency in society to help people without fear of legal prosecution.

    Each state has a different good Samaritan law, and some are very specific, but most are pretty inclusive. There's only a handful of states that are very specific. But at the end of the day, one of the most common themes behind all of these laws is that if you're doing what you are trained to do and you're doing it with the intention of helping someone, those good Samaritan immunities tend to really extend to you.

    Now, the opposite is also true. If you're doing something you are not trained to do and you're doing it for any other reason to try to help, you could be held liable for that. So it's not that you can or can't be held liable, it's what are your actions? And if you're doing what a reasonable person would do at the same time, there's a good chance, now I'm not a lawyer, but there's a good chance those good Samaritan immunities would be extended to you. That's how I would answer that question. It's a very good question and it is on a lot of people's minds.

    Marie Manning: Okay, one last question. How do you decide whether to administer first aid or whether to wait for professional help to arrive?

    Matt Levy, MD: For me, it's an interesting question. As a physician, as someone who's practiced emergency medical care for 30 years now in a variety of capacities as an EMT and a paramedic and then a physician, I'm going to look through the lens of do they have a problem that I need to fix right now or their outcome could be affected because of it?

    Now, that's a lot to distill in a 20-minute webinar, but what I would say, practically speaking is do they have one of those signs of a time-critical emergency? One of those elements, one of those symptoms or things where if we don't act, they could have a bad thing. If they're unconscious and they're not breathing, then they need chest compressions and they need CPR. Do you think they've had an overdose of an opioid? They need naloxone. If they're bleeding severely and it's life-threatening bleeding and it's on an arm or a leg, they need a tourniquet. If it's not or you don't have a tourniquet, they need pressure.

    But knowing what to do is really important. And the best way I can answer that question is by emphasizing and really begging you all, learn what to do and learn how to take action. But for me, that whether or not I choose to help at that moment in time really comes down to is if they're having a time-critical situation. And if they are, then I'm going to help. Or if there's going to be a delay in responder care, then the same idea.

    And that scenario of course is for the stranger, the person in society that we come across. If it's a family member, a loved one, that's a different circumstance where you're going to obviously, hopefully help your loved ones if you like them, but you're going to try to do what you can to help people.

    Marie Manning: Great. And for anyone interested in taking the Until Help Arrives course, which really does deal with the critical injuries that Dr. Levy just described, our producer has put the URL here in the chat box. You can look at it and go from there.

    All right, well, that is our time and I really actually wish we had more time with you because this has been such a fascinating and engaging conversation. I learn just as much from these conversations as our viewers do. So thank you for sharing and spending your time today with us.

    Now to our viewers, if you're hearing this message, you've listened to our episode all the way to the end, and for that, I thank you. Next week we're continuing to recognize Preparedness Month and we'll talk about business continuity and planning. So this is how we prepare for disruptions at work.

    We'll also be going into detail on another Red Cross program called the Ready Rating Program, which is designed for businesses of all size, but particularly small businesses. Our guest is going to be Michael Kleeman, who is chair of the Disaster Cycle Sub-Council on the Scientific Advisory Council. So stay tuned, you'll see links on our LinkedIn to these events.

    And Dr. Levy, thank you for being our first of what I know will be many sessions that we have with our Scientific Advisory Council. We really appreciate your time.

    Matt Levy, MD: Thank you, Marie. And thank you again to everybody who tuned in to listen. Be safe, do great things, and reach out if we could ever be of help. Thank you.

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